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How Interest Groups Influence Legislative Decisions The extent to which Interest Groups influence legislative actions and agendas is an important topic, and is widely researched. This paper will review the research of a handful of literary scholars and describe the attitudes and theories of each toward this commonly debated topic. I will address this topic through my understanding of interest groups’ influence, solely based on my reading of the sources I will list further into this paper. While the evidence supporting one’s feelings on this topic may lack empirical strength through direct observations, the relevance of this argument is valid nonetheless. The direct influence of the approaches these groups take in persuading legislators is numerous and often hard to measure. The two most significant actions these groups take to promote their beliefs and the interests of the people they represent, however, are campaign contributions and lobbying. These two techniques vary in the effects they have on political decision makers. Opinions on whether interest groups influence voting, or simply the agendas brought to the table varies from author to author. Richard Smith (1995) looks at both sides of this debate and explains th